True Crime: Streets of LA

Is it grand thievery or a new take on a relatively new genre?

Graphics The visuals of True Crime are mixed bag of great and not-so-great. You never get a loading screen as you motor around the hundreds of square miles of Los Angeles and much of the LA you see can be destroyed either by fist, bullet or bumper. On the other hand, the camera can get hung up behind walls and will fight you more often than it should, especially when you're on foot and the auto-targeting system detects and enemy nearby. Then again, you're getting an extremely accurate representation of Los Angeles down to the streetlights, landmarks and quirky neighborhoods. It's not that the driving elements look better or worse than the on-foot segments of the game. Each part has its strengths and weaknesses but the sum total is just north of decent.

The list of the good stuff when it comes to True Crime's graphics includes the well done cutscenes that come complete with lip-synching to go with all of the marvelous voice actors involved. Whether he's on foot talking on his cell phone with the fine people of the EOD or back at headquarters itself, Nick Kang's scenes that set up and explain the missions you've just carried out or about to take on are all well produced. The particle effects when you crash into fences, trees, lamp posts and even concrete barriers are also very effectively good looking. While it's unrealistic that a detective of Kang's height and build would be able to punch holes in solid adobe, it looks cool when, in the middle of a street fight, one of his errant punches destroys a piece of the environment. Garbage, benches, tables and nearly any other item that looks like it would be breakable in real life can be smashed up convincingly.

The animations during the fight sequences are surprisingly well executed. Considering you've got an entire city represented, the fact that Nick looks as good fighting indoors as he does outside, is very impressive. As you unlock new moves and throws, the grappling and striking animations get more complicated and you can appreciate the difference from one move to the next. Even if the move has an inane name like "Kung Pao" it looks awesome.

The list of bad things about True Crime's look includes many technical hang-ups. There are far too many clipping issues that come up far too often to be ignored. Similarly, the camera ties into the clipping problems so that there will be times when the camera will float through and behind a wall or tree during a fight so that you can't see the action at all. If the fight flows in such a direction so that the camera dislodges itself from said wall, you might see that Nick and his opponent are both "phasing" into and out of trees, cars, bus benches or any other piece of the environment during their fight like a couple of pissed-off ghosts. True Crime is indeed an ambitious game, but it doesn't mean that an intelligent camera system and a solid looking game environment aren't requirements. These problems are just too significant to overlook.

Another problem with rendering all of LA is nailing the right amount of traffic, both vehicle and pedestrian, flowing around the city. There are only a handful of NPC models available here but you only see a handful of them at any given time. That is, when you're out on the street rousting suspects, you may grab the same guy twice because there will be six dudes that look just like him on that particular block. Same for cars. At times the streets will have nothing but SUVs and taxis out there, even though there won't be nearly enough of them. The next time you're out, there will be lots of cabriolets and luxury sedans. (Rockstar North did the same thing in the GTA series, too.) Inexplicably you can have all-out fist fights in the fast lane on any freeway whenever you want. Bumper-to-bumper traffic is the lifeblood of the City of Angels and this game needs a transfusion.

The representation of the streets of Los Angeles might be the real star of the game. While accurately depicting every McDonalds and Starbucks spread across the I-10 corridor from downtown to the beaches would've been nice, we're quite impressed with the fact that every single street, avenue and boulevard is right where it should be. The rough parallelogram (you never thought you'd hear that one from us) defined by Pacific Palisades to the northwest, Marina Del Rey to the southwest, Downtown LA to the southeast and Los Feliz to the northeast is the sandbox for True Crime and every nugget of pavement between those points is as it should be. So much so that Los Angeles natives --or anybody who knows their way around La La Land-- will have a tremendous advantage when it comes to the timed driving portions of the game. If you've used a shortcut down a back alley to dodge the cops in real life, it'll probably serve the same purpose in True Crime.